February 21, 2019Ellen Dostal – Broadway World Never has the relationship between Iago and Roderigo in Shakespeare’s OTHELLO stolen the show like it does in the current A Noise Within production, directed by Jessica Kubzansky. Read more… Now running through April 28

February 20, 2019Deborah Klugman – Capital & Main Birth tourism in the United States is a flourishing business. Each year thousands of women from foreign nations pay big bucks to birth their babies on U.S. soil, insuring that their child (courtesy of our Fourteenth Amendment) will become a U.S. citizen. Read more… Now running through March 24

February 19, 2019Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze Is anything more fascinating than the mind of man? From the 1930s through the ’60s, entertainer Nat “King” Cole seemed the epitome of gentlemanliness, clad and coiffed to perfection, his quiet croon a soothing voice in turbulent times. But in “Lights Out: Nat ‘King’ Cole,” a West Coast–premiering playRead More

February 15, 2019Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw Ragtime has got to be up there with Oklahoma! as one of the most undeniably American musicals of all time, and it has finally come home to Southern California. Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s musical made its U.S. premiere at the now-demolished Shubert Theatre in Century City in 1997, before openingRead More

February 13, 2019Terry Morgan - Stage Raw Artistic ambition should always be encouraged. If artists never attempt greatness, if they never try working on a bigger canvas, we wouldn’t have works like Angels in America or The Iceman Cometh — plays that demonstrate how amazing theatre can be. Read more… Now running through March 17

February 13, 2019Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze Presumably expelled by his New York City church for being gay, Griffin Matthews gathered his earnings from his then-unfruitful acting career and headed to Uganda for a six-week stay to help build a school. He changed lives there. The Ugandans he met changed his. And from this real-life journeyRead More

February 12, 2019Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze “Admit passersby!” urged Britain’s wartime instructions. In Matthew Bourne’s dance-theater production of “Cinderella,” we find a reminder to open up our hearts and let the sunshine in. But the story Bourne tells, at the Ahmanson through March 10, is far from the sunny fairytale we might expect. Using SergeiRead More

Archive for Broadway World – Page 2

TITUS ANDRONICUS is one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedies. Characters are stabbed, beheaded, mutilated, raped, baked in a pie, and one is even buried up to his neck and left to die. At first glance it may not sound like an obvious choice for families…….Read more...

You cannot walk five feet in the Pantages Theatre without encountering a bunch of mini pies for sale, perfectly setting the scene for Waitress, the hit Broadway musical that opened in Los Angeles for the first time last night.Read more…

Rob Stevens – Haines His Way

In 2007 writer/director/actress Adrienne Shelly created a little gem of an independent film entitled Waitress. Unfortunately Shelly was murdered before the film’s debut. In 2015 playwright Jesse Nelson and songwriter Sara Bareilles turned the story of three waitresses and their love lives in a small Southern town into a Broadway musical.Read more…

Ellen Dostal – Broadway World

Can eating a pie be a religious experience? It can if it was made by Jenna, the diner waitress in the Broadway musical WAITRESS, who turns ordinary ingredients like butter, sugar, and flour into mouthwatering slices of life in a pie tin.Read more…

Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw

Easy as it is to bemoan the current trend of turning movies into Broadway musicals, Waitress, now playing at the Pantages in Hollywood, is proof that Broadway shows can still tell beautiful stories, even when they’re based on movies that came out over a decade ago.Read more…

Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze

Though a few of its ingredients are so right, so much is so wrong with “Waitress,” the musical now at the Pantages.Read more…

Murray Mednick’s play, having its world premiere, is a tale of two suicides: that of the Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who shot himself in the heart in 1930, and that of Nadezhda Alliluyeva (Nadya), the second wife of Joseph Stalin, who shot herself in her bedroom during a Communist Party gathering, supposedly in disgust at the way her husband’s brutal collectivist policies had produced mass famine.Read more…

Ellen Dostal – Broadway World

There are plays that tell a story and there are plays that ponder ideas. Murray Mednick’s latest world premiere MAYAKOVSKY AND STALIN is the latter, an intellectual dissection of two Russian revolutionaries who were as integral to Eastern European history as beets are to borscht. Read more…

One thing’s for sure – country musicals are an awful lot of fun. There aren’t very many of them and, if you can name one at all, it’s most likely THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS or THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM. But there is another rarely produced gem that is just as enjoyable – PUMP BOYS AND DINETTES……Read more…

Frances Baum Nicholson –The Stage Struck Review

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the definition of what made something a Broadway-style musical was in flux.Read more…

Sometimes it’s the most seemingly random interactions that go on to have the greatest impact on our lives. This is the topic explored in Arrival & Departure, a play written and directed by Stephen Sachs and inspired by the 1945 film Brief Encounter. Read more…

Ellen Dostal – Broadway World

For Laura, in Noel Coward’s beautiful pre-World War II black & white film, Brief Encounter, it is an unexpected meeting at a train station that leads to a secret romance with a friendly stranger named Alec. In ARRIVAL & DEPARTURE, the stage play inspired by Coward’s film, written and directed by Stephen Sachs, it is a moment in a modern day New York subway station that thrusts Emily (Deanne Bray) into a similar romantic conundrum with another stranger, Sam (Troy Kotsur). Read more…

It contains possibly the last words William Shakespeare ever wrote and chances are you’ve never seen a production of it. THE TWO NOBLE KINSMAN was written around 1613 but not published until 1634, and is attributed to both Shakespeare and John Fletcher, the man who would succeed him as…..Read more…

As its inaugural production, new classical theatre company The 6th Act, led by co-artistic directors Matthew Leavitt and Liza Seneca, presents two playwrights united by a common theme in AN EVENING OF BETRAYAL. Act One is Harold Pinter’s BETRAYAL...Read more…

Halfway through Act I of Eugene O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT at the Wallis, I was looking at Rob Howell’s see-through set design when it dawned on me. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. If only the Tyrones had gotten the memo.Read more…

Neal Weaver – Stage Raw

In Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill wrote what is probably the most searing family portrait ever penned. It owes its extraordinary power to the fact that it is mercilessly autobiographical. Read more…

Rob Stevens – Haines His Way

Eugene O’Neill won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his masterwork, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. O’Neill wrote the semi-autobiographical play about his family in 1941-42 but it was never produced until after his death. I’m sure it caused his parents to spin in their graves anyway. Read more…

Sinewy dance and visceral themes are among the hallmarks of Not Man Apart – Physical Theatre Ensemble, a company of performers that aims to bring dance and theater together and frequently succeeds in a brilliant way.Read more…Now running through August 4

Tom Hanks as Falstaff, Joe Morton as King Henry IV and a solid supporting ensemble add up to half a dozen good reasons to see director Dan Sullivan’s staging of Henry IV,….Read more…

Ellen Dostal – Broadway World

Director Daniel Sullivan‘s adaptation of HENRY IV, Parts 1 & 2 may only be playing in the Japanese Garden on the VA campus for another three weeks but it is bound to rank as one of the summer’s most talked-about events. Read more…

Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania

William Shakespeare’s Henry IV focus on growth and having history thrust upon oneself whether wanted or not. For The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, director Daniel Sullivan has culled and combined both plays into an evening of ribaldry, song, and pageantry. Read more…

Terry Morgan - Talkin’ Broadway

Shakespeares duo of Henry IV plays are mainly about two subjects: the relationship between fathers and sons and the conflict between duty and selfishness. That these topics are placed in one of his history plays means little—audiences havent cared primarily about the history on display here for centuries. The appeal of these plays has ever been in its characters and humor and beautiful language….Read more…

How is it possible that a musical based on a book written nearly 40 years ago feels more timely than ever today? The tour of the Tony-winning Broadway revival of The Color Purplejust opened at the Pantages Theatre, and its messages of female empowerment in the face of rape, sexual assault, and domestic abuse resonate so strongly with the Time’s Up movement that its presence in Hollywood feels prescient. Read more…

Rob Stevens – Haines His Way

The Color Purple began as a Pulitzer Prize winning 1983 novel by Alice Walker. The 1985 Steven Spielberg film adaptation received critical and audience acclaim although this viewer found it overly saccharine (too much patty-cake in the cornfields, too many shots of shadows on the walls). Read more…

Ellen Dostal – Broadway World

That joyful noise you hear coming from the Hollywood Pantages Theatre this month is the thrilling sound of female empowerment, and it is reverberating like thunder from the heavens in the dynamically robust national tour of THE COLOR PURPLE. Read more…